virtualization

For the third year in a row, I am happy to say we were honored with a Best of VMworld award.  In 2008, we won an award for the Cisco Nexus 1000V, last year, we won an award for Cisco UCS and this year we won an award for the Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualization feature (or OTV to friends) running on the Cisco Nexus 7000.

As a technology that was obviously thought up by and named by the networking geeks in the company, why should virtualization admins care let alone bestow an award?

RT @VMwareView: #VMware View 4.5 meets all requirements in Burton's/Gartner’s HVD eval criteria - http://bit.ly/9JKue3 #VDI

In talking to our customers, one of the things that I hear consistently is that customers appreciate our open solution stack.  What does that mean?  Well, a couple of things—first of all, it means that our innovations are individually available—you can connect a UCS to any upstream Ethernet and Fibre Channel switch, you can connect the server of your choice to a Nexus switch and still take advantage of OTV, FabricPath or unified fabric and you can run the Nexus 1000V in pretty much any hardware environment supported by vSphere.

The other thing this means is that we build solutions stacks with insertion points for our partners so our customers can take advantage our our solutions while still working with their favorite data center vendors.  Both vBlocks (Cisco, EMC, VMware) and SMT (Cisco, NetApp, VMWare) were initial examples of this approach.

Today, we are adding to the list with a newly announced desktop virtualization solution developed in partnership with Citrix.   Desktop virtualization is taking off with our customer for a number of reasons from reducing costs, to faster app deployment, to improving regulatory compliance and we have been listening to what our customers have been asking for.

The new solution with Citrix XenDesktop combines Cisco UCS and Citrix desktop virtualization technologies including FlexCast™ and HDX™, to deliver a cost-effective, scalable and high-performance solution for hosting, securing and optimizing the delivery of virtual desktops and applications.  

In this video Ben Gibson of Cisco and Gordon Payne of Citrix discuss the announcement:

Of course, we are not going to roll out a me-too solution.  

During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. A very interesting one is Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for VMware.

In mid June VMware and Novell announced an OEM agreement to offer a copy of SLES for each licensed copy of vSphere 4.1.More than that, the SLES license includes patches and updates. But the two companies didn’t include technical support: that one may be purchased separately from VMware: pricing starts at $600 for 12×5 phone support for one year.

Now the distribution is officially available but, surprisingly, you have to download it from Novell.
The current version is SLES 11 Service Pack 1, available for both 32 and 64bit, which Novell reports to be “tailored to run on VMware vSphere”. Access to the ISOs requires to register a free account with Novell, so the reason why VMware is not distributing itself the Linux OS may be to give Novell enough visibility on the account database, as part of the OEM agreement.

So far VMware didn’t really clarify the reason to have a branded version of SLES.

The official plan is to adopt the Novell OS as its platform of choice for all its virtual appliances. In the past VMware selected Ubuntu for a similar purpose, but regardless of why the partner has been changed, there’s no real need to have an OEM’ed Linux distribution. The company is big enough to provide its own enterprise support for any OS of choice, and in fact customers have to buy SLES support directly from VMware, and not from Novell.

VMware is moving towards an architecture where ESX that doesn’t include the Console Operating System (COS), so this OEM deal is not even for that purpose.

A (way too easy) explanation may be that VMware is testing the enterprise customers reactions to a fully-owned software stack, which, if positive, may lead to the future acquisition of Novell.

A couple of weeks before VMworld (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware released a new minor update for its application virtualization platform ThinApp.

Despite the version number, ThinApp 4.6 (build 287958) introduces major new components and capabilities:

• Converter (a P2V migration tool that automates creation of ThinApp packages)
• ThinReg (allows to execute virtualized services at operating system boot time and expose to non-virtualized applications)
• ThinDirect (allows to associate specific web pages to virtualized browsers)
• Support for virtualized Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows 7 operating systems (both 32 and 64bit)
• Management COM object (for package inspection and control of package inspection, registration, streaming, and updates)
• Integration with View 4.5

In many ways the most important new feature is the introduction of Converter. The program accpets a .ini configuration file which specifies where a certain installation file is located in the corporate network. Once located, Converter interacts with Workstation 7.x or ESX 4.x to produce a ThinApp virtualized application in a fully automated fashion by executing the following tasks:

• Distributing packaging work-load across multiple virtual machines
• Connecting to a named VM Workstations, vSphere, or ESX
• Taking snapshot of VM initial clean state
• Logging into Guest VM
• Mounting package source UNC share inside of VM.
• Mounting library output UNC share inside VM
• Running ThinApp pre-install snapshot process
• Running application installer in guest
• Waiting for application installer to complete
• Running ThinApp post-install snapshot process
• Generating application project from two ThinApp snapshots
• Building generated project into a package
• Saving both project and package in output library
• Reverting Virtual Machine to initial state

More importantly, ThinApp 4.6 introduces the integration with the upcoming View 4.5.
ThinApp applications can now be packaged and stored on a network file share. This network repository can be imported into View Manager. Once there, applications can be assigned to selected individual desktops or designated pools of desktops.Administrators can choose to have them streamed via a shortcut on the guest OS desktop or to directly deploy the virtualized package inside the virtual desktop.

At the end of July virtualization.info exposed an upcoming new product, part of the VMware vShield security porftolio called codename Seraph. The company officially unveiled and released it last week at VMworld (see virtualization.info live coverage) under the name of vShield Endpoint.

Endpoint 1.0 (build 287872) is the last piece of the new vShield security family. The other components are Zones 4.1 (the first product, acquired from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008), App 1.0 (see virtualization.info coverage) and Edge 1.0 (see virtuaization.info coverage). The four pieces are all centrally managed by vShield Manager 4.1.

Compared to the others, Endpoint is not a real product. It rather is a security framework that leverages the VMware VMsafe APIs and allows third party anti-virus vendors to scan and remediate infected virtual machines in a new way.
The interaction between the anti-virus solution and the target VMs happens at the hypervisor level, in a transparent way, through a process known as introspection.In this way 3rd party security engines can be deployed only on a single, dedicated VM, offloading the protected guest operating systems from the execution of resource-demanding endpoint agents.

The only agent that virtual machines have at that point is the vShield Endpoint one, informally called thin agent, which exposes the file system activity to 3rd parties through an API and a library for remediation.
The health status of this VMware agent is monitored inside vCenter Server.Of course the agent has to support the target guest operating system. The VMware offering is still weak here with the lack of 64bit support for Microsoft client operating systems (where the antivirus really needs):

• Windows Server 2003 and 2008 (both 32 and 64bit)
• Windows XP, Vista and 7 (32bit only)

The side benefit of this solution is that the AV signature database is downloaded only once, rather than being replicated for tens or hundreds of VMs.As out-of-band anti-virus scanning is particularly important in VDI, vShield Endpoint 1.0 integrates with the upcoming View 4.5.

Like Zones and App, every instance of Endpoint only protects the VMs in a specific host through a Loadable Kernel Module (LKM) called EPSEC.The primary component, a hardened virtual appliance called Security Virtual Machine (SVM), is not delivered directly by VMware but by its security partners.

To control Endpoint and the other new security products announced at VMworld, VMware is using an additional component called vShield Manager. This is a centralized policy management console that doesn’t require any specific license.  
vShield Manager can be accessed through a web interface or the VMware SDK as it offers a specific API.Such API allows advanced manipulation of all information produced by the other vShield products, like rules and the logs.

vShield Endpoint 1.0 pricing starts at $1,513, which includes protection for 25 virtual machines and 1 year basic support (12×5). Of course this is just the price for the endpoint agent. Customers have to add on top of it the cost for the 3rd party anti-virus solution.

TrendMicro Deep Security 7.5 is the first antivirus product on the market to support vShield Endpoint.

During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. One of them is vShield App 1.0.

VMware acquired the vShield security technology from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008. The only product offered so far has been Zones, a virtual firewall that uses stateful inspection and application layer gateway approaches to monitor and filter virtual network traffic between multiple virtual machines deployed on the same virtualization host.vShield Zones didn’t mature much in almost two years, and VMware is offering it for free as part of vSphere Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.

vShield App is an enhanced version of Zones. At the moment App doesn’t replace Zones but customers can purchase an upgrade so it’s likely that over time VMware will fade away Zones entirely.Like Zone, App too must be deployed per virtualization host as a Loadable Kernel Module (LKM). The key difference between the two products is the introduction of Flow Monitoring and Security Groups.

Flow Monitoring is the ability to recognize some protocol sessions between virtual machines in the network traffic. This capability is limited to specific TCP/IP Layer 2-4 protocols: ICMP, ARP, other L2/L3 protocols, UDP and TCP. Like for vShield Edge, there’s no mention about IPv6 support and the App administrator’s guide specifically mentions IPv4 capabilities.Administrators can use the report generated by Flow Monitoring to generate new firewall rules.

The other key difference, is the availability of Security Groups. These are logical containers that let users to group together different virtual machines by their vNICs. So rather than specifying every single virtual machine by its IP in the rulebase, firewall administrators can finally create group of objects and use them as source or destinations in the rules.

To control Zone, App, and the other new security products announced at VMworld, VMware is using an additional component called vShield Manager. This is a centralized policy management console that doesn’t require any specific license.  
vShield Manager can be accessed through a web interface or the VMware SDK as it offers a specific API.Such API allows advanced manipulation of all information produced by the other vShield products, like rules and the logs.

Like for the new vShield Edge, vShield App 1.0 pricing starts at $4,538, which includes protection for 25 virtual machines and 1 year basic support (12×5).

During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. One of them is vShield Edge 1.0.

VMware acquired the vShield security technology from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008. The only product offered so far has been Zones, a virtual firewall that uses stateful inspection and application layer gateway approaches to monitor and filter virtual network traffic between multiple virtual machines deployed on the same virtualization host.vShield Zones didn’t mature much in almost two years, and VMware is offering it for free as part of vSphere Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.

A major limitation of Zones was the inability to filter traffic entering and leaving the virtual network, which is a critical need in multi-tenant cloud computing environments like the ones created by the new vCloud Director.VMware overcame this limitation by releasing extending the vShield product family with this new solution called Edge.

Zones and Edge share the same firewall engine, but while the former is attached to a specifc virtualization host, the latter is attached to a specific portgroup.In this role, the engine has been enriched by a few key new capabilities:

• Site-to-Site VPN (IPSec only)
• NAT and DHCP services
• Web load balancing (HTTP/S, with Round-Robin algorithm and sticky sessions)
• Logging on local or remote Syslog facilities (Firewall and NAT rules, VPN connections, load balancing sessions, DHCP bindings)
• API

Because of its key importance in the VMware vCloud infrastructure, vShield Edge also allows to meter network utilization and account it to specific tenants when it’s integrated with vCloud Director.

The VPN component has some limitations: it only supports pre-shared key mode, AES or 3DES encryption, IP unicast traffic, and no dynamic routing protocol between the vShield Edge and remote VPN routers.

The way it’s deployed implies that vShield Edge can isolate different portgroups in a way that reminds the VLANs on physical network switches.Anyway, to have this feature, customers need to deploy a specific Loadable Kernel Module (LKM) on each virtualization host they want to control. The enforcement of other features don’t have this requirement.

To control Edge, Zone, and the other new security products announced at VMworld, VMware is using an additional component called vShield Manager. This is a centralized policy management console that doesn’t require any specific license.  
vShield Manager can be accessed through a web interface or the VMware SDK as it offers a specific API.Such API allows advanced manipulation of all information produced by the other vShield products, like rules and the logs.

vShield Edge 1.0 pricing starts at $4,538, which includes protection for 25 virtual machines and 1 year basic support (12×5), which is not exactly an affordable solution for SMBs.

During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. One of them is the long, long awaited vCloud Director 1.0 (formerly vCloud Service Director, and before that Project Redwood).

vCloud Director 1.0 (build 285979) is a management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds powered by VMware vSphere 4.1. It should not be confused with the vCloud Express platform that just four hosting providers worldwide adopted and offered in the last few months as part of large beta program.

This first release of the product introduce a number of basic capabilities expected in this class of solutions, like:

• Self-service provisioning portal
• Content catalog (virtual machines and templates library) with customization on provisioning
• Resource pooling
• Resource monitoring, reporting and billing
• Role-based user access (RBAC)
• Multi-tenancy
• Service Level Agreements enforcement
• API

CONTINUE READING ON CLOUDCOMPUTING.INFO…

Last week Proxmox Server Solutions released version 1.6 of its open source management solution for hardware and OS virtualization platforms (KVM and OpenVZ): Proxmox VE.

Proxmox has been in development for a few years now. virtualization.info covered the product for the first time in May 2008, when it was still a pre 1.0 solution.Version 1.0 was released in October 2008 and so far the company updated it quite regularly, adding key functionalities like the live migration for KVM, a wide support for storage protocols, and the inclusion of DRBD, which allows storage replication with active/active mode.

Version 1.6 introduces the OpenVZ patch for Linux kernel 2.6.32 and KVM 0.12.5, plus the update for a number of other components.

The roadmap for version 2.0, which doesn’t have a planned release date yet, is rich:

• Complete new web interface (new javascript framework, RIA)
• Based on Debian Squeeze
• New cluster communication based on corosync
• HA for KVM guests
• User management (advanced)
• RESTful web API
• Extend pre-built Virtual Appliances downloads
• Resource monitoring
• Firewall

Proxmox Server Solutions offers annual support subscription: 399 Euros / year per CPU sockets with unlimited cores.Support is only through the online help desk system, through email and if needed through remote access. Apparently there’s no phone support available.

In June Eucalyptus Systems announced the second version of its flagship product: Eucalyptus, a management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds powered by Xen and KVM.At that time the only edition available was the Enterprise one, but a couple of weeks ago the company also released the open source counterpart.

The open edition of Eucalyptus 2.0 introduces:

• Support for virtio implementation in KVM (users can choose between emulated device drivers or direct kernel supported I/O devices)
• Support for iSCSI protocol for Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes
• Support for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) versioning
• Support for Fedora guest operating systems

CONTINUE READING ON CLOUDCOMPUTING.INFO…

A couple of weeks ago Xen.org released Xen maintenance release 4.0.1.It’s primarily for bug fixing but it also introduces a few new capabilities.

First of all the default pvops kernel is now 2.6.32 (Xen 4.0 used kernel 2.6.31). Secondarily, they pygrub boot loader now support loading para-virtualized guests using GRUB2 configuration files. But more importantly, Xen 4.0.1 introduces Remus support, the Xen fault-tolerance package, for pvops dom0 kernels.

Xen 4.0.1 is expected to be included in the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) as the project further matures. It still uses Xen 3.4.2

A few weeks ago, before the VMworld conference, Veeam released a new integrated monitoring and reporting solution called ONE.

ONE 1.0 includes Veeam Reporter and Veeam Business View, plus a monitoring solution of choice between Veeam Monitor, nWorks Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) and nWorks Smart Plug-in for HP Operations Manager. So basically ONE comes in three editions.

The product is not just a commercial bundle: the company worked to integrate the products together as a single platform. For instance the combination of Monitor, Reporter and Business View is now called Veeam Monitor Plus.This specific combination is also available as a free edition because Veeam offers free, limited versions of both Monitor and Reporter.

The stand-alone products are still available but over time is entirely possible that Veeam will move to just offer this integrated package.Last week the startup VKernel moved in a similar direction by announcing an integrated solution built from stand-alone products. The two companies are not yet in direct competition yet, but it’s evident that VKernel is keen to increase its presence in the monitoring and reporting market and that Veeam has similar interests for the capacity management space.

ONE 1.0 pricing starts at $550 per socket.

Last week Quest announced three new products, Clout Automation Platform 7.5, vFoglight 6.5 and vFoglight Storage 1.0, but just the last one is available right now.

vFoglight comes from the rebranding of the Vizioncore portfolio, completed at the end of August.The last Vizioncore version of the product is 6.0, released in November 2009. The new 6.5 version introduces a number of new capabilities, including the much expected support for Microsoft Hyper-V, but it won’t be available before Q4 2010.

vFoglight Storage 1.0 leverages the Vizioncore monitoring engine and GUI to control the physical storage layer, providing details about the topology (relation between arrays and datastores) and performance of SAN arrays in the virtual infrastructure.The product ships with pre-defined alerts and reports helpful to understand when the capacity thresholds are matched.

vFoglight Storage provides Latency, I/O / sec and MB / sec, number of read and writes as performance metrics, as well as size, used/committed and number/amount of entities as capacity metrics.

The data history is limited to just 30 days. Customers can expand that only by integrating the product with vFoglight.

First version of the product doesn’t support all kind of storage vendors. NetApp filers (both Fibre Channel and iSCSI), through the DataOnTap API, and EMC CLARiiON CX3 and CX4 SANs (both Fibre Channel and iSCSI) are supported.
During the whole 2011 Quest will extend support to HP, Dell, IBM, Hitachi and other EMC SANs.Support for fabric switches is limited too: only Brocade and Cisco Fibre Channel switches are supported right now.

Quite interestingly, while the product can be installed on any VMware virtual machine, Quest recommends to run it on physical hosts when it has to monitor large virtual infrastructures (e.g.: 4 clusters with 6 ESX hosts each).

Quest sells vFoglight Storage at $499 per CPU socket.

Last week VKernel released the second version of its Capacity Management Suite (CMS), a solution that integrates most of the company products.

Specifically, CMS 2.0 includes Capacity Analyzer 5.0, Chargeback 2.0 and the Optimization Pack 2.0, which includes the tools Wastefinder, Rightsizer and Inventory.Inventory was not included into CMS 1.0 so this is a welcome addition.

Compared to the previous version, this is not just a commercial bundle: VKernel merged all the products above in a single virtual appliance, unified the analytics engine across the board and provided a single management console.Despite that, licensing remains per-product, so that customers have a modular solution. Pricing starts at $299 per socket.

CMS 2.0 introduces a remarkable number of new features:

• Capability to partially automate the capacity plan (resources increase only)
• Capability to exclude specific VMs (powered off ones, groups, etc.), specific resources (like storage for example) or specific time frames of the day from the capacity analysis
• Customizable capacity models
• Support for thin provisioning
• Configuration change reporting
• HA failures notifications
• vCenter Servers federation

Clearly, these capabilities have been also implemented on VKernel stand-alone products. While it’s still possible to buy single products, over time the company plans to replace them with this single appliance and its modular licensing model.

Interestingly, VKernel reports over 500 customers worldwide now, ranging from 50 to 5000 virtual machines.

Earlier this week the US startup Virtual Computer announced the availability of NxTop 3.0.Like Neocleus (just acquired by Intel), Virtual Computer pioneered the use of a client hypervisor to enhance the enterprise desktop management. While Neocleus focused on platform security, Virtual Computer focused on virtual machines software and user management.

The solution includes two tiers: NxTop Center and the actual client hypervisor, NxTop Client.
The marketing investment made by Citrix to promote the upcoming XenClient, and the now-postpostoned launch of VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), helped to increase a lot the attention for NxTop. So Virtual Computer recently decided to offer a scaled down free version of its platform.Such free version of NxTop still required the centralized management component, but the interest for a client hypervisor from system administrators pushed the startup to release the NxTop Client as a stand-alone, completely free product: NxTop Workstation.

So the biggest part of NxTop 3.0 is the first, free, general purpose client hypervisor on the market. And quite remarkably, it doesn’t require the Intel vPro technology at all.

NxTop Workstation has a notable support for industry standard hardware, including all Intel and AMD CPUs that feature VT-X and AMD-V, GPUs from Intel, NVIDIA and AMD, 3G/4G USB modems, USB peripherals like webcams, and even serial ports.Best of all, the client hypervisor supports both 32 and 64bit versions of Windows as guest operating systems.

As already said, the platform is completely stand-alone, and this means that users can create new virtual machines from the local control panel. The GUI that glues together the different VMs is well done, even if there’s still a lot of room for improvement in the user experience: the biggest challenge in the area is to intercept and block the users attempts to interact with the Windows control panel inside the VMs.

Another area of improvement for NxTop Workstation is the backup and restore of VMs. Without the NxTop Center component this task may become fairly complex to accomplish. Virtual Computer is already working to address this challenge: in future releases uses will be able to plug an external hard drive in the USB port and seamlessly backup their VMs.

Of course NxTop 3.0 also introduces major features on the server side of the suite:

• A new hierarchical architecture, where large organizations can deploy a secondary copy of NxTop Center in each of their branch offices
• The capability for system administrators to remotely control end-user virtual desktops
• A new policy-based bandwidth throttling to control traffic between NxTop Center and NxTop Workstation

Virtual Computer has reshaped its offering in three editions: Enterprise, Business and Express.The Express edition is free of charge, capped to 5 users. The Business one is capped to 500 users, while the Enterprise edition is unlimited.

Virtual Computer also announced a strategic alliance with Quest.
The agreement basically implies that the Quest vWorkspace connector will be shipped out-of-the-box as part of NxTop Workstation starting this October.
The Quest connector improves the Microsoft RDP performance thanks to the Experience Optimized Protocol (EOP) developed by Provision Networks.The client is installed in the small footprint virtual appliance that Virtual Computer uses to host the platform management tools (like the control panel) and a bunch of utilities: NxTop Connect.

NxTop Connect is a customized Linux distribution, that Virtual Computer turned into a lightweight operating system with essential programs for the users that don’t want to power on their bulky Windows virtual machines.
It currently includes Chrome, Skype, and the Linux implementation of the RDP client.Any additional software partnership that Virtual Computer will be able to close, will probably translate in a new component inside Connect.

The idea of a speedy, lightweight and extensible virtual machine that can be used for quick operations, is pretty much the same approach that Phoenix Technologies tried to bring to the market with their now defunct HyperCore. HP acquired that asset from Phoenix in June for $12M, and it’s not clear what it plans to do with it.

The idea of a minimal operating system, with just browsing, remote access and communication capabilities is also shared with Google which is expected to launch its Chorme OS before the end of the year.It’s entirely possible that Virtual Computer will drop the currently used Linux distro to adopt and extend the Google platform to further reduce the NxTop Connect footprint.

Virtual Computer released NxTop 2.0 in March. Despite its size and the limited resources available, the company managed to deliver a remarkable product, beating on time all major players in the space.virtualization.info had the opportunity to try NxTop Workstation 3.0 and had a very positive impression.

Virtual Computer has been rated as “Worth Watching” on the Virtualization Industry Radar.

VMTurbo is a new virtualization startup that left the stealth mode in April. The company’s technologies was previewed in July, but only last week the actual products were announced and released.

As virtualization.info previously reported, the VMTurbo platform is made of many different modules, to monitor, plan, automate and report about the management of a virtual infrastructure.The first two pieces of the suite are called Monitor and Host Reporter. Both are available now and come as part of the same virtual appliance.

Monitor, completely free of charge, lists the virtual machines and hosts health status and provides real-time metrics about vCPUs, vRAM, vNICs and vHDs, detecting resources bottlenecks:

VMTurbo Host Reporter instead provides offline charts and graphs that display virtual infrastructure trends over time, including:

• CPU, memory and network bandwidth utilization
• CPU % ready, memory ballooning and swapping
• Workload demand per VM

This module costs $30 / socket.

In the near future VMTurbo will introduce the key piece of the whole suite: the Automate module.Once statistics are collected and information about under and over-utilization provided, the product will offer a number of capacity management recommendations. At that point the user will be able to just read them, or to automatically apply them, just by pressing a button on the interface.

Earlier this week RingCube announced the availability of its platform wrapper vDesk 3.1.

vDesk, the enterprise version of MojoPac launched in March, features an interesting hybrid architecture which doesn’t use hardware virtualization but acts like other products in that market segment, including VMware ACE, Microsoft MED-V and MokaFive Virtual Desktop Solution.

Version 3.1 introduces a few new security-oriented and synchronization features:

• pre-authentication host checking
• granular logging (for regulation compliance)
• virtual environments compression before synchronization
• block-level differencing

During the VMware VMworld conference the company, which claims 99% of native performance, has previewed an upcoming version of its product that leverages the Intel vPro technology.

Last week the Canadian startup Embotics released version 3.6 of its VM lifecycle management solution V-Commander. Version 3.0 went out almost exactly one year ago, without groundbreaking new features. But this new V-Commander 3.6 introduces a couple of very interesting additions:

• capacity management
• self-service provisioning web portal

The company claims that this version of the product scales up to 15,000 virtual machines and that the ROI comes after just four months.

Interestingly, Embotics also announced the upcoming support for Microsoft Hyper-V.

In the last four years PHD Virtual (formerly PHD Technologies) has been solely focused on the VMware market, competing with larger companies like Quest/Vizioncore and Veeam. But in early 2010 the startup decided to extend its support to other virtual infrastructures. This led to an investment from Citrix in May, and to the release of Backup for Citrix XenServer 1.0 last week.

The new product offers the same look & feel of the VMware version but the feature-set is not completely aligned yet.
PHD Virtual clarified to virtualization.info that this doesn’t depend on any technical constrain or lack of R&D resources: simply, the company delivered the XenSource version as soon as possible and so had to prioritize the delivery of certain capabilities. In the coming months, the two version will share exactly the same capabilities.

The company published a video of the new product in action:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Quite interestingly, PHD Virtual is also working on a version of Backup for Microsoft Hyper-V, which should be available before the end of the year.